Unless academic achievement in one’s youth is followed by lifelong habits of study and inquiry, it may lull a man into grossly overestimating his understanding of the world.
As far as I know, history’s worst example of this was Nevil Maskelyne, the English Astronomer Royal from 1765 to 1811. A key member of the Board of Longitude during a period when Britain was desperately trying to discover a way to calculate longitude at sea, he was so proud of his knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that he steadfastly refused to acknowledge that John Harrison’s marine chronometer offered a simple, mechanical solution to the problem.
For years, Maskelyne used his influence to prevent Harrison’s chronometer from being recognized as the obvious solution that could prevent British vessels from getting lost at sea and shipwrecked because the navigator couldn’t be sure of his longitude. It was only when Harrison got an audience with King George III—who pronounced “By Jove, Harrison, you’ve been wronged!”—that he was recognized for his ingenious and useful invention.
Nevil Maskelyne was a talented astronomer and mathematician, but when it came to the practical business of easily calculating longitude at sea, he was dead wrong, and his academic pride hindered him from acknowledging it. In addition to terribly wronging John Harrison, Maskelyne consigned innumerable sailors to misery and even death at sea by delaying the widespread adoption Harrison’s chronometer as standard equipment on British vessels.
I was reminded of Maskelyne this morning when I read Senator Bill Cassidy’s August 15 essay in Washington Examiner, Trump’s vaccine legacy is America’s strategic shield.
Senator Cassidy earned his Doctor of Medicine degree from Louisiana State University in 1983 and then worked as a full-time physician and liver specialist for the LSU Earl K. Long Hospital in Baton Rouge for two decades before going into politics in 2006.
His education and his experience in medicine have apparently lulled him into overestimating his understanding of the world. It seems to me that his essay in the Washington Examiner surpasses a stopped clock in the thoroughness of its inaccuracies and falsehoods.
He opens by parroting cartoonish propaganda about measles, and then—in what appears to be an obsequious attempt to flatter President Trump’s ego—proclaims Operation Warp Speed to be one of the greatest triumphs in history.
After making this grandiose and delusional assertion, he makes the following pronouncement:
In the meantime, COVID-19 taught adversaries, such as the Chinese Communist Party, how to weaponize pandemics. The playbook is obvious: design a virus, secretly develop a vaccine, immunize your own forces, and unleash the pathogen abroad. Within weeks, an unprepared America could be militarily and economically incapacitated. The only defense is a rapid-response vaccine platform that can pivot instantly to meet the threat. That is what mRNA offers: mRNA vaccines take less time to manufacture than other platforms. That is why it is confounding that some in the administration now want to undermine the president’s historic success. Abandoning mRNA vaccines now would be like dismantling space-based infrared missile satellites before an air attack.
It’s hard for me to believe that Senator Cassidy has remained ignorant of the mountains of evidence that the scheme he describes was, in fact, perpetrated by American and Chinese collaborators. Right now he should be asking the following questions:
1). Given that he regards the Chinese Communist Party and military as adversaries of the United States, why did the U.S. NIH approve sharing cutting edge American biotechnology with the Wuhan Institute of Virology between the years 2014 and 2020?
2). Why did the NIAID approve and even provide funding for Professor Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill and Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance to work directly with WIV virologist Shi Zhengli to make SARS-like bat coronaviruses infectious to humans?
3). Why did Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, patent a genetic sequence in 2016 that was later found to match perfectly a 19-nucleotide genetic sequence encompassing the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19?
4). Why did Moderna provide Ralph Baric with its mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidate to perform “challenge studies” a few weeks before—according to the official U.S. government timeline of events—SARS-CoV-2 was officially discovered in China?
On the slim chance that Senator Cassidy has somehow remained completely ignorant of this greatest organized crime in history, I will attempt to edify him by publishing here the relevant excerpts from our new book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality.
If any of our readers have contact with a member of the Senator’s staff, please share this post with him.
Chapter 22: A New Illness for a New Vaccine Era
In 1965, the British virologist David Arthur John Tyrrell—director of the Common Cold Unit—discovered a new virus. Under an electron micro- scope, the nucleocapsid appeared to be garlanded with a crownlike structure. As he related in his book Cold Wars: The Fight Against the Common Cold:
We looked more closely at the appearance of the new viruses and noticed that they had a kind of halo surrounding them. Recourse to a dictionary produced the Latin equivalent, corona, and so the name coronavirus was born.
As the title of his book indicates, Tyrrell regarded coronaviruses as pathogenic insofar as they caused the common cold—the most common infectious disease in humans. Reviewing the historical chronicles of infectious disease, it seemed that the deadly respiratory viral pandemics documented in the past were more likely caused by influenza viruses than coronaviruses.
However, about twenty years after Tyrrell first described human coronaviruses, a gifted and industrious microbiologist named Ralph Baric began obsessively studying coronaviruses and looking for additional ways in which they could cause disease, especially by creating recombinant variants of a coronaviruses—a process at which he became increasingly adept with years of practice.
Baric pursued this line of inquiry between 1985 and 2002. In April 2002, he and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina filed a patent application for their Methods for Producing Recombinant Coronavirus. The contents of the patent application revealed that he had come a long way in discovering how to manipulate coronaviruses in his lab. The purpose of his work, he claimed, was to create recombinant coronaviruses in order to develop vaccines against them.
About seven months after Baric et al. filed their patent application, the first apparent cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) were reported in Foshan, Guangdong China. In February 2003, several people, including an American businessman, staying in a Hong Kong hotel came down with the syndrome.
The businessman then traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was hospitalized. Dr. Carlo Urbani, a WHO scientist in Hanoi, visited the patient and suspected he was suffering from a novel disease. Urbani himself contracted the disease and died on March 29, 2003, in Bangkok. On April 1, 2003, the WHO announced:
A new pathogen—a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans, is the cause of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The speed at which this virus was identified is the result of the close international collaboration of 13 laboratories from 10 countries.
Between November 2002 and July 2003, SARS is estimated to have infected over 8,000 people from thirty countries and territories, and to have caused at least 774 deaths worldwide.
Looking back, it strikes us as a remarkable coincidence that “a new pathogen—a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans”—emerged just seven months after Ralph Baric et al. filed their patent application for Methods for Producing Recombinant Coronavirus.
Quickly this “new pathogen” became all the rage in pandemic planning circles, and a flood of NIH and private foundation money was made available to coronaviruses researchers like Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill.
In June 2005, Professor Baric gave a talk titled “Synthetic Coronaviruses. Biohacking: Biological Warfare Enabling Technologies” at a DARPA/ MITRE-sponsored event in Washington DC.
After the 2009 “Swine Flu Pandemic” proved to be a dud, many virologists began to wonder if another pandemic influenza as virulent as the 1918 Spanish Flu would indeed emerge in their lifetimes. A few years after influenza researchers Kawaoka and Fouchier made a splash by creating an H5N1 bird flu virus capable of respiratory transmission among ferrets, Baric and a British zoologist named Peter Daszak—President of EcoHealth Alliance—teamed up to obtain a massive, multi-year NIH grant bonanza to study coronaviruses that purportedly had the potential to emerge from bats into humans.
Previously a wildlife conservation organization, EcoHealth under Daszak’s leadership rebranded itself as an institution for studying emerging infectious disease threats in areas such as southern China. EcoHealth claimed that expanding human development is encroaching on tropical forest habitats of animal species that could be viral reservoirs. Its goal was to catalog these viruses and predict which ones are most likely to jump species and infect humans.
Here it’s worth noting that even virologists who were instrumental in concealing the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2 have expressed profound skepticism about Daszak’s prediction concept. As Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, and Kristian G. Andersen put it in a 2018 comment in Nature:
Determining which of more than 1.6 million animal viruses are capable of replicating in humans and transmitting between them would require many decades’ worth of laboratory work in cell cul- tures and animals. Even if researchers managed to link each virus genome sequence to substantial experimental data, all sorts of other factors determine whether a virus jumps species and emerges in a human population, such as the distribution and density of animal hosts. Influenza viruses have circulated in horses since the 1950s and in dogs since the early 2000s, for instance. These viruses have not emerged in human populations, and perhaps never will—for unknown reasons.
Nevertheless, because of the 2002 SARS outbreak in China, Daszak and Baric were able to sell their research project to various U.S. federal agencies, including the NIAID, USAID, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, where alleged anthrax serial killer Bruce Ivins had worked.
The paper trail of Baric and Daszak’s work to modify bat coronaviruses in the lab to make them infectious to humans is so vast that only a U.S. Congressman or New York Times reporter could fail to see it.
In 2013, Daszak and his collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper (in Nature) titled “Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-like Coronavirus That Uses the ACE2 Receptor.” As they put it, for the first time in history, they’d found two wild bat coronaviruses that would bind to the human ACE2 receptor. These two viruses were named,
1. Bat SL-CoV-WIV1
2. SHCOI4
Because these two virus species could (Daszak claimed) bind to human ACE2 receptors, they were (Daszak further claimed) of great interest to virologists who are in the business of anticipating which viruses could, in theory, mutate and evolve to infect and become transmissible among humans. Daszak’s 2013 paper with his WIV colleagues Xing-Ye Ge and Zheng-Li Shi attracted much attention in virology circles.
The following year, Daszak and Baric obtained multiyear NIH funding for a research project under the grant title “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” Continuing their work with Xing-Ye Ge and Zheng-Li Shi, Professor Baric performed gain-of-function work on the bat viruses SL-CoV WIV1 and SHCO15. They then published two papers in 2015 and 2016:
- “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence” (published in Nature Medicine).
- “SARS-like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence” (published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS).
In the first paper, Baric and colleagues describe how they created a “chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse- adapted SARS-CoV backbone” and named it SHC014-MA15. In the second paper, Baric and colleagues describe how they “also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone” and named it WIV1-MA15. Regarding their first chimera (SHCOI4-MA15), Baric et al. made the bold claim that it
. . . can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate effi- ciently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.
These papers are just two pieces in the mountain of documentary evidence that SARS-CoV-2—the causative agent of COVID-19—was made in a laboratory by Ralph Baric and his Wuhan Institute of Virology colleagues.
Another conspicuous document is Daszak’s March 24, 2018, proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), titled “Project DEFUSE: Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses,” seeking funding of $14,209,245. The reviewers at DARPA turned down the request because it proposed to do dangerous gain-of-function work on bat coronaviruses. Especially alarming was the proposal’s statement:
We will analyze all SARS-CoV gene sequences for . . . the presence of potential furin cleavage sites. SARS-CoV with mismatches in proteolytic cleavage sites can be activated by exogenous tryp- sin or cathepsin L. Where clear mismatches occur, we will intro- duce appropriate human specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cell and HAE cultures.
Two years later, when SARS-CoV-2—the causative agent of COVID- 19—emerged, virologists all over the world marveled that its genome contained a sequence for a furin cleavage site. This is the component of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that enables the virus to dock onto human lung epithelial cells, thereby initiating the viral replication process. It is the key feature of SARS-CoV-2 that made it infectious to humans.
One of the silliest lies told by Dr. Anthony Fauci has been his insistence that NIAID did not approve gain-of-function work by EcoHealth. Fauci has repeatedly asserted this in a loud and vexed tone, as though he is outraged by the mere proposition. And yet, Ralph Baric and his colleagues—including Zhengli-Li Shi at the WIV—plainly state in their 2015 paper,
These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses. (phe.gov/ s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.
The official, stated reason for creating SARS-like bat coronaviruses in a lab was to create countermeasures against them to protect humanity if such viruses were ever to evolve naturally to emerge in the wild. At a 2015 workshop hosted by the National Academies of Science, Daszak stated,
Until an infectious disease crisis is very real, present, and at an emer- gency threshold, it is often largely ignored. To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis, we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs [Medical Countermeasures] such as a pan- influenza or pan-coronavirus vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of process.
In other words, in addition to being a beneficiary of the federal grant gravy train, Daszak also positioned himself to be an investment consultant in vaccine development for coronaviruses.
During the years 2016– 2019, multiple players in the bio-pharmaceutical complex prepared for the emergence or the lab release of a novel coronavirus. They correctly perceived that the opportunity to make a killing was in the offing.
